I am a father of two and a Marine Corps veteran that was wiped out in superstorm Sandy. More than five years later I am still not home. I have been struggling for years to navigate the bureaucratic nightmare of greedy insurance companies, crooked engineers and dysfunctional grant programs to try to find my way back home.

My story is not unique among Sandy survivors. We’ve had to fight tooth and nail to get Gov. Chris Christie’s Sandy recovery programs to work for our families. Gov. Phil Murphy has inherited Sandy recovery, among other problems, from our previous governor.

Millions of dollars that should have gone to New Jersey families went down the drain — $25 million to pay for a tourist campaign featuring Gov. Christie, $6 million to a Senior Center in Belleville which wasn’t impacted by Sandy, but in a town where Christie earned the Democratic mayor’s campaign endorsement, $43.6 million spent on Hammerman and Gainer Inc, who were initially hired, and then fired, to run RREM, the state's Sandy reconstruction program.

They were hired shortly after their New Jersey law firm, Capehart Scatchard, made a $25,000 contribution to the Republican Governors Association, which was headed by Christie. That’s $74 million and just the most obvious and egregious examples. That doesn’t include the contractors the state didn’t properly vet who took money from survivors, and the overall costs of contractors like Gilbane and CBI. That is millions more.

One of Christie's parting gifts to Sandy families was to veto bipartisan legislation that passed both the Senate and the Assembly to address RREM clawbacks. Under Christie, the Department of Community Affairs decided to add insult to injury, and as part of closing families out of the RREM program, it sent letters to families telling them they had to return thousands of dollars that had already been disbursed.

Families who used every dollar they got from RREM, insurance, or even Small Business Association or other loans they were often pressured into taking to get home or to survive until they could, were given only 90 days to repay the state more than they make in a year. One family was asked to repay $18,000 because it hadn’t followed RREM's “scope of work.” That scope of work had indicated that rather than elevate their home, they should demolish the 1,200-foot first floor (that they had rebuilt with their flood insurance money) and rebuild it on top of their 600-foot second floor.

The state and the DCA will say that they had to do this because HUD required it. The DCA acted early in an aggressive manner that is devastating to families who have already been put through too much. And here’s what I think they state is required to do — stand up for families that have been battered by both the storm and the disaster after the disaster in trying to rebuild.

We met with now Gov. Murphy on the Sandy anniversary last year. He’s heard our stories, and he has the power to do this differently. When people used the funds to get home or hang on, the clawbacks should be forgiven or significantly reduced, and repayment timelines should be extended. While more than $70 million in Sandy funds were spent on politically connected contracts and ads, families are now being nickeled and dimed when all they did was go through hell and back to get home. We should not have to sell our homes now to pay back ridiculous sums to programs that took our health and years from our lives when the state threw millions down the drain.

If I were a millionaire I’d gladly pay my fair share of taxes to get our state back on track. I’m not, and most of us who survived Sandy and are still rebuilding aren’t either. But I would gladly pay less than half a percent more in sales taxes to finally have this injustice corrected and have these clawbacks stop. All we are asking is that Murphy end Christie-era abuses and stand up for a fair and just recovery from a tragedy that has gone on for far too long.

Doug Quinn is a resident of the Silverton section of Toms River and a member of the New Jersey Organizing Project.